Debian Bug report logs - #1004901
ncurses-bin: issues with the infocmp(1) man page and databases

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Package: ncurses-bin; Maintainer for ncurses-bin is Ncurses Maintainers <[email protected]>; Source for ncurses-bin is src:ncurses (PTS, buildd, popcon).

Reported by: Vincent Lefevre <[email protected]>

Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2022 10:15:02 UTC

Severity: minor

Found in version ncurses/6.3-2

Full log

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From: Sven Joachim <[email protected]>
To: Vincent Lefevre <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Bug#1004901: ncurses-bin: issues with the infocmp(1) man page
 and databases
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> (Vincent Lefevre's
	message of "Thu, 3 Feb 2022 11:10:50 +0100")
References: <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:56:57 +0100
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On 2022-02-03 11:10 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> Package: ncurses-bin
> Version: 6.3-2
> Severity: minor
>
> In the infocmp(1) man page:
>
>    Changing Databases [-A directory] [-B directory]
>        Like  other  ncurses  utilities, infocmp looks for the terminal
>        descriptions in several places.  You can use the  TERMINFO  and
>        TERMINFO_DIRS environment variables to override the compiled-in
>        default list of places to search (see curses(3X) for details).
>
> The curses(3X) man page does not exist. It is curses(3ncurses).

This particular problem has been fixed in version 6.3+20220423-1,
probably as a consequence of the following change in the 20211225
patchlevel:

,----
| + improve markup, e.g., for external manpage links in the manpages
|   (prompted by report by Helge Kreutzmann).
`----

As of version 6.4+20240113-1 there are no longer any '3X' references in
any of the manpages, and I have also added an autopkgtest to ensure that
they do not come back.

> Moreover,
>
>   FILES
>        /etc/terminfo       Compiled terminal description database.
>
> It is empty in my case. It appears that infocmp looks at other places,
> such as /lib/terminfo (most cases) and "$HOME/.terminfo".

Yes.  There are several places in the manpages where /etc/terminfo is
referred to as the system terminfo database, but it is really just the
place where tic(1) writes to by default, whereas the terminfo entries
provided by the distribution usually live under /usr/share/terminfo.
Someone™ should improve that, because it basically affects every Linux
distro out there.

> Instead of giving a directory that is not used in practice, give a
> reference to the curses(3ncurses) man page?

That would probably not be too helpful, because that manpage is likely
not present.  The "Fetching Compiled Descriptions" section in
terminfo(5) is probably the most accurate reference.

Cheers,
       Sven

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